Consciousness effectively functions as energy, always seeking to expand, grow, escape, push the boundaries, seek out the most efficient route. Intelligence is the accumulation and storing the memory of this process.

NSA has probably a D Wave machine… Churchill ordered the British electronic computers destroyed in 1945: he did not want to let the secret out (Churchill also toyed with keeping in prison all French nuclear physicists who had launched the nuclear bomb program in 1938…). One electronic computer survived… And the French physicists did not rat out to Stalin (although some Americans did…)

Good find! I long argued that it is GEOMETRY which is inherited, and DNA is just one example (Prions, another). Prions are involved in the brain…
The Quantum Computer is an approach to sentience (Artificial Sentience!). Going directly biological, another (say gluing neurons inside electronics). A variant is synthetic biology…

Slime mould is a single-celled organism
The mould learnt to cross a bridge that contained unpleasant substances to obtain food
The findings could provide clues as to when and where in the tree of life learning evolved”

“Misfolded proteins called prions—which lead to personality changes, dementia, and death in humans—may serve as a type of long-term memory in plants. That’s the fascinating possibility raised by a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, which shows that a plant protein involved in responding to light and temperature may have shapeshifting, prion-like powers, allowing it to form environmental memories that can distinguish a single cold night from a shift in seasons.”

Possibly we will start constructing computers out of biological material. Then we might have reason to worry about sentience and tools with attitude.

isn’t the real soul what pulses through the body and intelligence is the effect of it processing feedback?
So we assume that if we process information, it will become conscious?
Rivers and stream process information, as feedback from everything from gravity to obstacles. Wouldn’t that give them consciousness? No? That would be anthropomorphizing and deification. So why would a machine designed to read quantum state be conscious? Is it a tool, or a God?
If I use a hammer to strike a nail, I am imbuing it with my own consciousness, as it becomes an extension of my hand, but truly manufacturing sentience and not just extending it, seems well beyond our current abilities.